Ben Reeves came to attention a few years ago (maybe more than that) for urban landscape paintings overlayed with impasto patterns. The patterns often entered the painting or became naturalized by it through weather "systems" -- conditions like rain (beading on a window) or snow (falling). More recently these patterns have subsided and, as of today, Reeves opens a show of seascapes -- some of them sunny, a couple dark or darkened.
The image up top is a larger painting hung on its own wall at the northwest corner of the Equinox's main gallery. Maybe the last painting of the grouping you'll see upon entering, most of which feature high and higher horizon lines, reminding me of my own times at sea, the claustrophobia/nausea that comes from prolonged exposure to rising swells. But this painting up top is clearly made from the shore, where things are supposed to be calm. So what conditions were present to allow this view?
Are these the times? A time when the shore is no longer a sanctuary? Where no landscape (natural) is safe from portraiture's aggressive enthusiasm (interweb)? When I first saw Reeves painting I thought of what Aschenbach saw in Death in Venice; more Viscontini's filmic reading of it (1971) than Mann's source novel (1912). No longer a frolicking Tadzio (Aschenburg's youthful self and/or an object of his desire), but in my case, life's horizon, rising ever higher, becoming the wall that signals our end, and on the other side of that wall, an eternity -- with no horizon in sight.
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